i9.95US $9.95CAN ,,DJ PM400l 5685 , () _-\J1Jifgodoun 25JtlitANNIVERSARY RUG AND ” 1 · cALCFORiBIE! 1 ES?Eif’EBRlfil’O N: *xn.(ivt1{;tt .. . . ‘-:–‘· +-. ·. . ,,_ ,_ ,>{.·•-. ,. _·,1;7,.:::r�_fy;.,. ,·,, . ‘ Westward Ho, 34″ x 12″, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rock1Jille, Maryland, 2009. My 1Jery first shelf mat was dual purpose and not particularly successful at either purpose. At that time, Roslyn Logsdon’s Friday morning group had an annual show at a local library. Our theme that year was American history. I decided to depict a wagon train headed west. Roz belie1Jes anyone can draw, so she encouraged me to draw the design myself. I’m not really satisfied with the result, but I certainly learned something about drawing ( especially perspecti1Je) in the process. I do rather like the Indian hiaing behind the tree-and the fact that when displayed on my shelf, the wagon train is truly headed west! Howe1Jer, the oxen pulling the wagons look like nothing e1Jer seen in this world. St. Louis Hook-In, 34″ x 12″, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rock1Jille, Maryland, 2011. At a hook-in I adapted an idea hooked by another of Roz’s talented Friday Group hookers, and asked all those at the hook-in to draw me a shape. I then drew the sixteen or so shapes onto my backing, overlapping as the spirit struck me. The resulting mat is a study in bright colors and shapes on a dark background. Harriet Shapiro, a retired lawyer, lives with her husband in a retirement home just outside Washington D.C. She is a member of the Mason-Dixon Guild in Maryland and the Naomi Miller Guild in St. Louis, and she enjoys going to as many rug camps as she can. www.rughookingmagazine.com I Rug Hooking 67 READER’S GALLERY Harriet Shapiro’s Shelf Mats Lessons learned just outside the door BY HARRIET SHAPIRO PHOTOGR APHY BY ALFRED J. SHAPIRO An oddly shaped shelf outside the door of my apartment has become the perfect display area for my rug hooking projects. F our years ago, my husband and I moved to a retirement home. Outside the door of each apartment is a shelf 34″ long and 12″ wide with a triangular bite taken out of the front corner. Ours has become an ideal site for my hooked pieces and it now dictates the size of my current works-large enough to work out interesting designs, yet small enough to maintain my interest through to completion. The triangular bite poses something of a design problem, which, delightfully, has turned out to be a further stimulus to creativity. Even after hooking all the rugs you see here, my shelf continues to call me to imagine further projects-and the possibilities are endless! RHM 66 Rug Hooking I November • December 2013 READER’S GALLERY Seasonal Series Peg’s Flowers, 34″ x 12 “, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rockville, Maryland, 2009. For springtime display, I asked Peg Roedel, one of my St. Louis hooking friends, to draw stylized fiowers and butterflies for me. She drew a wonderful design on a backing the size of my shelf. The motifs were fun to hook in spring colors, but once they were done, I realized that the piece required a dark background, which rather interfered with the spring mood. Lesson learned: Consider your background’s tone before you hook the foreground. Our Beach, 34″ x 12”, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rockville, Maryland, 2009. For summer, I drew a beach scene based on the beach of my childhood, with a few figures on the beach, swimmers and sailboats in the water, and a plane beari;g a streamer saying “Ganset” ( the misspelled name of our summer community in Woods Hole on Cape Cod) . This was a simpler scene to draw than the wagon train and, accordingly, somewhat more successful. I used a snapshot of my older brother as a toddler as the foreground figure, ana Roz improved the image at my heartfelt request. The hardest part of this piece, and the most instructive, was hooking the water’s edge with just a frill of surf. I learned a lot in hooking the distant trees and rocks. Even after hooking all the rugs you see here, my shelf continues to call me to imagine further projects-and the possibilities are endless! 68 Rug Hooking I November • December 2013 Fall Leaves, 34″ x 12″, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rock11iUe, Maryland, 2009. Fall was a few leaves ( inspired by Google images) with a spiderweb. I started this project in a rug camp where Betty McClentic, another one of my f a11orite teachers, helped me with the colors of the leaves. The piece is displayed with a small plastic spider-and its position on the spiderweb changes from time to time! The spider and its web make this mat especially appropriate for Halloween. This is the first shelf mat that I’m unreser11edly satisfied with. Per haps it’s also the simplest; there may be a lesson there. If so, it’s not one I’ve taken to heart. Christmas Cards, 34″ x 12″, ,n PlOn, ‘, cl an.. .ab· arrie• Sh., 1r• … 20(} The final rug in this seasonal series was derived from two Christmas cards. It’s a snowy scene, and hooking the various shades of snow, remembering to account for distance and light source, was the major learning experience here. It’s a mat where perspective is important because I placed various characters at different distances from the viewer. www.rughookingmagazine.com Rug Hookmi 69 J I READER’S GALLERY Seasonal Series Nobska Ughthouse, 34″ x 12″, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rock1Jille, Maryland, 2010. My second seasonal series began with a rather con1Jentional lighthouse design, but the lighthouse is a specific one in Woods Hole. I drew the design for a rug camp in which I worked on rough water with whitecaps and real surf. Besides the water, the problem here was making the outbuildings discrete and the proper distance from the 1Jiewer. Mathilde, Queen of the Beach, 34″ x 12″, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rockl!ille, Maryland, 2010. The summer scene in this series is from a photo of my dear friend’s two-year-old granddaughter on the Gansett beach, stark naked except for fancy pink plastic flip-flops to protect her feet from the pebbles. She’s intently examining something at the water’s edge. Hooking the body and the straw-colored hair of the small child was a real challenge; I’m glad that the finished product doesn’t show how many times she was rehooked! I flatly rejected my husband’s suggestion that I repeat the scene as a gift for the child’s father who took the original photo. This was one of the harder mats I’ve done to date. 70 Rug Hooking I November • December 2013 Wellesley Library Girl Late Summer, 34″ x 12″, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rockville, Maryland, 2010. Wellesley Library Girl Fall & Winter, 34″ x 12 “, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rockville, Maryland, 2011. The final two rugs in this series were views of the same scene in summer and late fall. The image of a girl reading before a window came from a library poster I purchased at my 60th college reunion. In the course of hooking this figure, I discovered that her legs were oddly drawn in the original silhouette, which presented problems in the more specific hooking. It was fun to change the colors, the furnishings, and the trees to represent the different seasons. In the winter scene, I l.eft the space over the fireplace unhooked, and made two smaU hooked rectangles to fill that space: one a wreath for the Christmas season and the other a portrait for the rest of the year. (See below.) www.rughooklngmagazine.com I Rug Hooking 71 READER’S GALLERY Washington Spring, 34” x 12 “, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed and hooked /ry Harriet Shapiro, Rockville, Maryland, 2010. My second spring rug draws the most favorable comments from other residents. It is a view of a blossoming cherry tree in the foreground, looking over the tidal basin to the Jefferson Memorial in the distance. I proddied some of the cherry blossoms, a fairly tedious process, but that is the reason the mat is so popular. This mat also played with close and distant objects; a particular challenge was the white marble Jefferson Memorial with its steps; I’m not really satisfied with the way I dealt with that challenge. Animal Series Evelyn’s CAT-erpillar, 34” x 12 “, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed by Evelyn Lawrence and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rockville, Maryland, 2011. My most recent series project is the adaptation of four elongated animals designed by Evelyn Lawrence as stair risers and reproduced to my size specifications by Bev Conway. I used red plaids from my stash in the Cat-erpillar design, a cat’s head with nine semicircles for the body, to which I added boughs of leaves, some partially eaten. -,.., n .• rT , – • • Evelyn’s and Our Goose, 34″ x 12″, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed by Evelyn Lawrence and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rockville, Maryland, 2011. The goose design reproduces the characteristic shadings of the Canada goose in unrealistic colors; I tJ,l0d several silhouettes of fl,ying geese, as well as grass, fl,owers, a small caterpillar, and (barely discernible) goose poop – in recognition of our persistent problem with our local geese. Evelyn’s Crab, 34” x 12 “, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed by Evelyn Lawrence and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rockville, Maryland, 2012. To the elongated crab design, I added sand, shells, and various fish; I’m particularly pleased with the turning fish that Roz showed me how to do – I don’t know why the added stripe makes his head tum, but it does! Legend of the Grasshopper & the Ants, 34″ x 12”, #4-cut wool on monk’s cloth. Designed by Evelyn Lawrence and hooked by Harriet Shapiro, Rockville, Maryland, 2012. The final animal in this series is the grasshopper, which I rendered as a monochromatic yellow-green piece, adding working ants below and notes above him, to suggest the fable of the improvident grasshopper and the industrious ants. Though my yellow-green stash is ample, the monochromatic color scheme still posed challenges. www.rughookingmagazine.com I Rug Hooking 73
